Software, Tools & Online Resources

Here’s a list of some of the tools and resources we use and recommend on an ongoing basis both for our own business and for clients.

WordPress Related

WPEngine

Our goto hosting provider for anything WordPress. Fast, reliable, relatively cheap and has a bunch of features our dev team find useful including snapshot backups where they can do a restore in under 20 seconds and a staging environment where they can test changes before going live.

Sucuri

We use this on mission critcal WordPress sites that aren’t on WPEngine (WPEngine provides a similar service). Sucuri is a realtime threat and virus scanning solution for WordPress websites. They also take care of cleanup too.

Leadpages&OptimizePress

We rely on these two a lot for landing pages, opt-ins and off-the-shelf WordPress pages.

Gravity Forms

The only forms plugin we’ll use for WordPress. Super versatile and it saves form submissions to the WordPress database too so they’ll never get lost in email.

Yoast

Bottom line here, Yoast’s SEO plugins for WordPress are the best.

Hosting

GoogleApps

The only tool we use for email hosting. Its rock solid and seamlessly syncs email across all our devices.

Bluehost

The winning feature of Bluehost is its price. Its a great option for non-mission critical stuff. We use Bluehost for non-mission critical stuff such as redirecting secondary domains and there are a handful of clients who want cheap FTP storage.

Namecheap

Our goto for domain name purchases.

CloudFlare

We use Cloudflare for all our own DNS hosting and client DNS hosting. They’re rock solid for DNS hosting and their accleration and security features make a big difference to site performance even for sites hosted on WPEngine.

Pingdom

Our goto tool for testing website speed.

 

Marketing Tools

Autoresponder

An excellent tool for more advanced email automation, especially abandoned cart emails.

Terapeak

Forget about keyword research, this tool is amazing and is our goto ecommerce research tool. In a nutshell, you can do a search for a product and it will give you the actual sales data down to the cent for products selling on Ebay. It also includes seller information, history, frequency and a whole bunch of other stuff.

luckyorange

We use this for conversion rate improvements and behaviour analysis of customer sites.

godatafeed

Advanced price feed handling. We use this for complex setups and feed optimisation.

shopify

Bigcommerce used to be our number 1 but Shopify took that place 12-18 months ago. Its fast, reliable, SEO friendly, cheap and connects with 100s of other tools, APIs and platforms.

raven

We use this for a bunch of things including SEO analytics, Adwords review and reporting. The automated PDF reporting is probably the feature we use most here and is a fantastic way to get a snapshot view of how a site is performing. We have hundreds of clients setup in our Raven instance but would probably use it even if we were just reporting on a single site.

mailchimp

If you’re just getting started in email marketing Mailchimp is a great option. Its cheap (free for under 2000 people on your list), easy to use, reliable and plugs into 100s of other platforms without an issue.

infusionsoft

For serious email marketing and sales funnels we use Infusionsoft. Be warned though, its a beast and has a steep learning curve.

zopim

Our goto these days for live chat.

pareto

Our own tool for sculping good page titles and meta descriptions.

panguin

A quick and easy tool for detecting SEO penalties.

Eway,stripe,paypal

What we use to take credit card payments online.

dropship

If you’re looking at getting started in ecommerce or dropshipping, Anton’s Dropship Lifestyle course will get you up and running and teaches you everything you need to know about a basic ecommerce store.

serpfox

We use Serpfox for all our rank tracking.

Other Tools

zendesk

We couldn’t live without Zendesk. We use it for customer support and managing jobs in all of our businesses.

1password&lastpass

The only way we can manage thousands of passwords.

zapier

We couldn’t live without Zapier. Its an automation tool and probably does the work of 2 fulltime people in our business.

IFTTT

If this then that is like the “lite” version of Zapier.

skype

We use Skype for chat, voicemail, skype numbers and cheap calls, we couldn’t live without it.

viber

All my team are on Viber. We use this for time sensitive instant messaging where we need a quick response.

evernote

Our digital filing cabinet. We’re completely paperless because of Evernote. One of our favourite features is its ability to search text inside scanned documents.

Skitch

We use Skitch for taking screenshots and writing notes on there either to highlight something for a client or explain something to one of our team.

Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed is the second part of our paperless office. All our physical paperwork gets sent to Shoeboxed and they do all the scanning for me and then automatically put the docs in Evernote.

Xero

Cloud based accounting.

Crashplan

We use Crashplan for backing up our PC. We’ve had to rely on it a number of times. If you don’t have a full machine backup solution in place you should check this out.